Google has come up with a fresh potential way to bypass the resource limitations of energy-hungry AI data centers on Earth — by sending its AI chips into space on solar-powered satellites. This is a “moonshot” research project announced by Google today called Project Suncatcher.
If it ever gets off the ground, the project will essentially create space-based data centers. Google hopes that this way it will be able to employ solar energy around the clock. The dream is to tap into an almost limitless source of spotless energy that could allow the company to pursue its artificial intelligence ambitions without the concerns that its data centers on Earth have raised about increasing emissions from power plants and utility bills through the growing demand for electricity.
“In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI computing,” writes Travis Beals, Google’s senior director for Paradigms of Intelligence blog entry Today. The company also published, among others: paper for pre-printingwhich has not been peer-reviewed, providing a detailed description of progress in this endeavor to date.
“In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI computing.”
There are significant hurdles that Google would have to overcome to make this plan a reality, as he explains in the blog and article. Google envisions Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) orbiting Earth on satellites equipped with solar panels that will be able to generate electricity almost continuously, making them eight times more productive than similar panels on Earth, Google says.
The main challenge will be to ensure good communication between the satellites. Competing with data centers on land “requires inter-satellite connections supporting tens of terabytes per second,” Google writes. Maneuvering satellite constellations into tight formations could facilitate them do this, perhaps by flying the satellites “apart or closer” to each other. That’s much closer than satellites currently operate, and space debris from collisions is already a growing risk.
Moreover, Google must ensure that its TPU can withstand higher levels of radiation in space. He tested his Trillium TPUs for radiation tolerance and found that they “can withstand a total ionization dose equivalent to a 5-year mission duration without permanent failures.”
Sending these TPUs into space would be quite costly these days. However, the company’s cost analysis suggests that launching and operating a data center in space could become “roughly comparable” to the energy costs of an equivalent data center on Earth on a per kilowatt per year basis by the mid-2030s. Google says it plans a joint mission with Planet to launch several prototype satellites by 2027 to test hardware in orbit.